On off-chance you still have an Orkut account, you can export data until 2016.

Share this story

Google announced Monday that it has decided to kill off Orkut for good come September 30. And in case you’re really late to the party, you’ve missed your chance to open an Orkut account: Google won't open any new ones, either.

Further Reading

Google’s first foray into social networking began in January 2004—founded just one month before Facebook, but well after Friendster (which somehow has survived as a Malaysian gaming site). As Orkut faded into obscurity in the United States, it has remained popular to some degree in Brazil and India. (In 2006, we reported that it was a preferred hangout of Brazilian pedophiles.)

It was famously named after Orkut Büyükkökten, then a Google product manager, who conceived of the idea during the search giant’s famous “20 percent time.”

In April 2014, we named Orkut as one of Google’s projects that “need to die":

One look at a profile page and it's clear that Google's plan is to have Google+ slowly engulf Orkut. Just look at the Orkut screenshot above, which features "What's hot on Google+," "People you might like on Google+," and "View this post on Google+"—so much for this being Orkut. The non-Google+ parts that are there are rotten leftovers from ages past. There's a Google Talk—not Google Hangouts—chat bar which brokenly lists everyone you've ever interacted with on Google+ in the chat list and shows some Google Talk chat invites that have been deprecated.

Google noted that Orkut users—seriously, any Ars readers among them?—who want to export their data can do so using Google Takeout, which will only be available until September 2016.

Share this story

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar